Farmer versus Fox

This is my last post on Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. This book has been a theme for this blog for a while now, a useful lens for me to talk about a number of different things, but lenses need to be exchanged to avoid a permanently tinted viewing of the world. Back one more time to his conjecture: mastery is a prerequisite to true creativity. For this post, I’ll need to take you back to my very special night with Iron Cobra

Iron Cobra is actually Becky Johnson, a great Canadian improviser who did a solo show at the 50:50 comedy night last October. Half-way through she made an appeal to the audience: she flew over without a musician, and for the next scene it would be great to have someone playing the piano which was conveniently up on stage… As the tumbleweed spun through the small audience, she lowered the bar so low – from competent piano player, to a person that had taken lessons, to someone who liked the look of the piano – that I couldn’t keep sitting on my hands.

So, up I came, and ended up accompanying Becky for the rest of her set. My piano skills are remedial, but I seemed to fulfil what was unarguably a creative role: to inspire performance and contribute tone. So what was it that allowed this to happen? The important thing was that I was actively engaged and responsive. I gave my all – a couple of chords, arpeggios, scales and high-note twinkles –  in the right spirit, with abandon and a spirit of play. It sometimes had a bathetic quality which itself enhanced the creative contribution, but at other times I did a reasonable job of fuelling the tone.

What is true of this is  true of improvisation also. Skills and experience do count for something. But for my taste, good improvisation is first and foremost about arriving to the stage in the right state: relaxed, alert, out of your head, open to possibility and interested in your partner. I am very happy to watch inexperienced performers when they play in this state. In fact, there’s a case that much of the training actually boils down to accessing this state more consistently, by working on personal change rather than solely the accretion of skills. Much of the rest is simply window dressing. 

Let’s come back to Matthew Crawford for a last time. I’m with him that depicting a fake space for creativity is bullshit, and that we should call it when we see it. But finding new ways of approaching or thinking about a problem needn’t be restricted to technical experts. In fact, they may have over-determined responses to problems that prevent them from seeing different approaches. Fostering space for the proving, development and testing of ideas – before failure has high consequences – allows us to reap the benefits of an inclusive attitude to problem solving.

What’s more, some responses are necessarily improvisational, working with whatever you’ve got. Because of the hard limits around these responses, they tend to be simple; that simplicity is condusive to reuse, adaptation and repurposing, meaning improvisation breeds improvisation in a way that closed, complex systems are poor at. And for the ends that Shop Class as Soulcraft professes – human dignity and autonomy based on substantive contributions to navigating the world – we would do better to recognise the variety of ways in which we can contribute, from the expert to the intuitive, the precision to the experimental. 

And for me? Browsing  through my old blog recently, I’m reminded that its very purpose was “to proclaim my abiding dedication to the ideal of the polymath, or the diverse amateur”. A good purpose. I stand by it.

How about you?


Links
Iron Cobra site
Some posts from my old blog on specialism: one and two

 In a section of the book I found unexpectedly compelling, Crawford outlines a challenging repair to a bike, a Magna V45. Dealing with each part under suspicion demands intimate knowledge at both atomic and holistic levels: what the state of part A infers for B, C, Y or Z. The reason for this is that bikes are precision pieces of machinery, so his role is all about tuning, ever-more precise, beyond the limits that the bike begun with. 

There’s a conception of design space outlined in Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable that I find useful to call on. In that book, evolution’s job is to move us from the flats of undesign into the highland states of ever-more complexity. Thing is, any single random move (mutation) is likely to be unhelpful, and this becomes increasingly true as organisms become more complex – more elements to throw out of wack. Gear-head cycle tuning is right up there on the high peaks, and with a narrow criteria to meet – a more responsive beast with higher speeds – and a single customer needing you to deliver without any nasty surprises, it’s unsurprising that Crawford views with scorn the idea of the unexpert creative. 

However, there are a couple of ways in which things can look different.First. ideas can arise on the flats as well as on the peaks. Not everything is as complicated as a Magna V45 engine or jazz improvisation. If I’m promoting a neighbourhood event, and looking for a method beyond clipping a sheet to the town hall notice board, then my lack of a marketing qualification does not prevent me from twigging a good idea and acting on it. There’s no real fear of my innocent activity upsetting a carefully constructed consciousness-penetrating brand campaign – there isn’t one. I’m building from a minimal position. 

Second, moves that turn out to be bad don’t have to be a big deal. “Failure is not an option” was a byword of the Apollo 13 return. But in nature, failure is an option, and the one most frequently chosen. Pure natural selection is a “blind watchmaker” that gets it right mainly by virtue of getting it wrong so many times. Evolution operates in part by this process operating over and over, it’s iterations helping the organism and environment adjust and fit to one another.

Now, in our dealings with one another, we don’t have the disinterested view of evolution, that can simply shrug when mutations take an organism down no-hope alley. We are most definitely interested – that our astronauts come home ok, that our bike returns with its braking system fit for purpose. But whereas evolution’s testing ground is the world, we have more. We have our minds, our tools, and each other. The interconnectedness of the internet further facilitates this: ideas can originate in one head, be tested by another, run through models to check out concerns, before ever becoming a reality. But it’s always been so.

What this means is that we can afford to take risks in our thinking, in our idea generating, in our creativity. We should. We don’t need to wait for mastery in a domain to contribute to it, we just need to employ the networks of mastery – our spaces to try out iterations –  to ensure that ideas get their proper hearing, and those with potential are developed further. 

I think these twin examples do fit the picture of many creative acts at work. Crawford may contest this, as these things are not monumental, complex and enduring, but I think this just reflects the multitude of meanings that inhabit the term. Nevertheless, I don’t dispute his claim that expertise-bound creativity is immensely satisfying, and for this to be hollowed out of jobs is a great pity. He also warns that creativity and freedom can be a cover for management laziness/incompetence, where subordinates are expected to make decisions, credit for which is passed up to the manager, and failure is passed down to the subordinate. I have no quarrel with this, either.

The beginning of the end: this post begins the final theme I want to take away from Shopwork as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. In some sense it’s more tangential, and it’s actually the first thing I wrote.  

What jobs are creative nowadays? Are we seeing an upsurge in creativity at work, or is this propaganda to keep us in a false consciousness? There was a round of debate on this last year on Crooked Timber, but reading Shopwork as Soulcraft reinvigorated this issue, as Crawford makes an even more savage case against a rise in creativity.

Specifically, he asserts that “creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practise” which requires “submission” rather than freedom. If we believe otherwise, we will willingly swim the ephemeral streams of modern life, never gaining grounded competence in a single craft, competence of a sort that grants us genuine (economic) freedom and the capacity to create. Labelling jobs as creative is a great misdirect, and we shouldn’t stand for it. I think Crawford has it half right.* It’s true that some cultural products call for a minimal skill set. Many enduring works of art are the product of a tenacious history of practise and improvement: Malcolm Gladwell makes much of this anecdotally in Outliers, his book on people with exceptional achievements. That said, I’m certain there are counterexamples of talents who made a genuine mark without having ‘paid dues’ along the way, and would be fascinated in your examples in comments. One for me would be Mike Allred, who exploded onto the comics scene after working as a journalist for much of his adult life. Across the board however, I’d probably put the balance of enduring cultural products in the hands of those with the mastery. 

I see it in my own experience too. I’ve been improvising for three years and change, following a much longer background in the related roleplaying scene, and I know this: there are some things I see more experienced players do that I’m currently incapable of. And: there are some good things I do now that I didn’t before, and that other greener players can’t or won’t. The psychologist R. Keith Sawyer talks of certain fundamentals that need to be in place for jazz creativity to kick in – comfort with standard chord substitutions, familiarity with the dynamics of performance to sense when a solo is ending, and so on. In a nuts-and-bolts physical skill like juggling, I’ve noticed a step change from just being able to manage the basics to having command of the basics, and thus the freedom to creatively combine them.

But is it true that all creative acts relate to mastery? Here I disagree with Crawford, and suspect our differences may be disciplinary. Crawford’s grounding is in high-end motorcycles repair and improvement, where being exact is all. I’ll describe this further in the next post.

Links

Mike Allred’s site

R Keith Sawyer’s site